Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

As he talked, Michael no longer felt as if he was hiding his actions from Slater, but rather pursuing a cause, beyond her detection. He knew he could help Samantha and Josh. That it was the right thing to do. As much as he wished he wasn’t, he was a recent graduate of their breed of loss. It was the least he could do, to risk his own prosecution to remain in their lives.

Slater continued her questions: No, he hadn’t seen the ambulance. And no he hadn’t heard anything from next door once back inside his flat. Had he seen Josh? Not since…he paused to think of the night. Thursday night. It must have been Thursday. Yes, they’d had dinner.

“No,” he corrected himself. She paused in her writing. “Sorry. It was the next morning.”

“When you last saw him?” she asked.

“Yes,” Michael said. Somehow he’d really forgotten. “I dropped round to lend him a screwdriver. For his glasses.”

“A screwdriver? He didn’t have one of his own?”

“Not of that size, no,” Michael said. “It was from my fencing kit,” he added, looking towards his fencing bag in the hallway.

“At what time was this?”

“It was early, before eight. Samantha,” he said, remembering Lucy banging that spoon against the table. “She hadn’t taken Rachel to school yet. So yes, it must have been early.”

―

Minutes later Slater was leaving, putting her notebook and pen back into her jacket pocket and handing him her card—“In case you think of anything else.”

“Yes, of course,” Michael said, putting it on the kitchen counter.

He showed her to the door. “How are they doing?” he asked, as he opened it. “Samantha and Josh,” he explained, although there was no need.

She frowned, then sighed, looking out into the stairwell. No, Michael thought, she hadn’t done this many times before. “They’re devastated,” she said, still looking away and raising her eyebrows, as if there could be no other answer. She turned back to him. “It’s been a terrible shock.”

Extending a hand, she shook his. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Turner,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your day.”

“No, thank you,” Michael found himself saying, “for letting me know.”

She nodded, the flicker of a question passing through her expression. She let it go. “Not at all,” she said, as she went to the stairs. “Have a good day, Mr. Turner.”

And then she was gone, her small feet tapping down the staircase, carrying his false day in her notebook out of his front door and into the real one.

THREE DAYS AFTER DS Slater’s visit, Michael was sitting with Josh on their usual bench on Parliament Hill. It was early in the morning and the first time Michael had seen Josh since the night he’d watched him weep beside the fence. Samantha had called him the previous day. He’d been washing up at the sink in the kitchen when she’d rung. As the phone pulsed on the work surface, he’d stared at her name on the screen before answering it.

“Samantha.” He hoped her name would be enough to carry all he wanted to say.

“Thank you for your card.” Her voice was quiet, a whisper. She paused. When she spoke again her voice broke across his name. “Oh, Michael.”

For a few minutes she cried. Michael listened, then asked if she wanted him to come round. No, she said, not yet. But could he, she wondered, go for a jog on the Heath? With Josh?

“He needs it,” she said. “He needs to get out, to talk.”

“It’s very soon,” Michael said.

“I know, but honestly, he needs to get out.” She paused. “I need him to get out. Just for a bit.”

“Yes,” Michael said. “Of course.”

“I think he’ll talk to you,” she went on. “Because. Well…”

“Yes,” he said again. “I know.”

After Samantha hung up, Michael stood for a while where he’d answered the phone, looking out at the street below. Then he’d gone into his study, selected a Beethoven string quartet on his iPod, and sat at his desk, letting the long, reverberating notes wash the room, and him.

Hearing her voice, he’d wanted, desperately, to tell her. On the wall above his desk was a postcard of a Grecian urn with Keats’s lines written underneath— Beauty is truth, truth beauty. He was consigning himself to ugliness, to a single lie that would bleed through the years ahead of him. He would be a deceiver forever. Not as he was in his writing, in pursuit of a greater clarity, but in his life, in pursuit of an omission, a lie. He’d become a manifestation of his authorial technique, disappearing himself from those minutes in the Nelsons’ house just as he’d always disappeared himself from the page.

But he was determined. And as the music moved on to the next movement, it seemed to confirm the rightness of his resolution. The sacrifice of it. So he’d resisted and said nothing. He hadn’t called Samantha back. Instead, he’d done as she’d asked of him and woken early this morning, dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and trainers, and gone next door to call for Josh.

Michael found him already waiting outside their front door. He could tell he hadn’t slept. The skin below his eyes was bruised with tiredness. As Michael had answered Samantha’s call with her name, so as he approached Josh he met him with his.

“Josh.”

He didn’t reply, but just nodded and began walking down the street towards the Heath, as if they had a job to do that was best done, if at all, quickly. Turning onto the grass at the bottom of the street, they began their usual route, walking in silence up through the colonnade of London plane trees, through the worn fields of the fairground sites and on into the shaded path of the boundary road. As they crossed the South Meadow, Michael felt his calf begin to loosen, the knots of muscle opening like a rose. But Josh, pacing beside him, remained closed. Michael didn’t want to be the first to talk. He knew, from those first days after Caroline had died, when Peter had been so often in the cottage — coming by, cooking him meals — that for Josh his silence would feel like the only part of himself he still owned, that he might still understand.

On reaching Highgate Gate they dropped down through the trees into the grounds of Kenwood, then rose again onto the gravel path that traversed the façade of the house. As they passed its shuttered windows they heard the attendants preparing for the day inside. Opening the shop, stocking the tills. Somewhere in the gardens a strimmer worked at a hedge. In the last window Michael caught a glimpse of them both — Josh walking with his head down, as if following a guideline just in front of his feet. Michael, tall beside him, his amputated stride arriving in his shoulder as an awkward jerk. At the end of the house they followed a stream down between the layers of Bagshot Sand and Clayton Beds, then crossed a footbridge over Wood Pond and on up into the South Woods itself. They began jogging without any communication, picking up their pace exactly where they always did, at the edge of the Duelling Ground, crossing its oval of scotched turf to join the path leading down towards Hampstead Gate. Their route remained unchanged, undisturbed. And everything else about their run, too, was the same as it always had been. Except for the air they bore with them, polluted as it was with the unspoken knowledge of Lucy’s death, partly known in each man, but only completely between them both.

On reaching Parliament Hill they slowed up the slope, walking the last few metres to the scattering of benches on its summit sitting in salute to London below. Michael sat on their usual bench, then felt the wood beneath him give as Josh added his weight beside him.

The heat wave had broken. Armadas of high cumulus were patching the city’s mosaic with shadow. A cool breeze spoke of rain, approaching from the north behind them. A flock of starlings rose and fell on the sports fields below, like a sheet shaken over a bed.